I Might Not Come Back

They give you an invocation leave, I think. Seven days I came home, and my mother was in Montreal, and I stopped here in Halifax with my father for a few days. I didn’t want to stop too long with my mother, because she’d get nosy. She said, she asked me, “So where are you going? ” I said, “I’m going to British Columbia.” “British Columbia? That’s a long way.” I said, “Yeah, you just write Canadian Post Office Box 5000,” and I said, “I’ll get all the mail and any parcels you want to send me.” Well, that was the overseas address for when you went overseas. She didn’t know. Interviewer: Tell me, why didn’t your mother know you were going overseas? Oh, she would have me pulled out. I couldn’t take that. If I went to join again, I’d have to start all over, all over again. She did try to get me out, when it was pretty near time for me to come home from Korea. And I had a good buddy in the office. He said, “We’ll cancel that. We’ll take it and we’ll send it to Hong Kong.” They sent it to Hong Kong. I was home and everything when they called me, and wrote the letter. I said, “I’ve been over in Korea and I’ve been back.” And he said, “This ain’t no good.” I said, “What’s it about it? ” He said something about you being too young. I said, “Yes, I’m 19.” He said, “Well, we won’t worry about it.” If that guy hadn’t have picked that up, I would have been back home again. They wouldn’t let me out of the army, but I would have had to go another time, you see. Interviewer: When you spoke to your father, you used the same trick with him? No. I told him I was going overseas, over to Korea and that, and I said, “There is a chance that I might not come back.” “Well,” he said, “I know that, I know what wars are.” Because he was born in 1907. He knew about the explosions and everything. So I said, “I might not come back.” “Oh,” he said, “you’ll be back. You’re too bad for something to happen to you.” But other than that, he … he accepted it, even when I wrote him, when I was over there, you know. He told me, he said, “Just take it easy and come on home.” And I did come home, so.